ALMA is a London-based ambient group formed in 2014 and fronted by songwriter Pete Lambrou. On May 26th they officially release ‘Remixes & Reworkings’, a digital overhaul of their esteemed ‘ALMA’ debut album, to tie in with a European tour which culminates in a slot at the famed Dunk! Festival in Belgium alongside fellow sonic truth-seekers Earth, Swans and God Is An Astronaut, as per the dates below. Never ones for half-measures, ALMA got all seven serene tracks of that original ‘ALMA’ album remixed, reworked and sometimes actually rebuilt from scratch by seven different experimentalists in sound.

Top creative marks go to Charlie Barnes from the Bastille band, who rebuilds live favourite and radio track ‘To The Stars’ from the ground up and gives it a show-stopping kick with jazz guitar, ELO-esque sub-operatics and a lounge lizard vocal delivery. Indeed, so involved in this rebuild was Charlie that he recorded a live video for the track – with Pete and Ciaran from ALMA as his backing band at: https://youtu.be/iNMth3L7by0 Now we can’t say we saw THAT coming…

Elsewhere, ‘Remixes & Reworkings’ revels in gasps of glitchy, twitchy electronic minimalism emboldened by swathes of sonic loveliness, not least in Message To Bears’ fragrantly whooshing ‘While Nothing’, Noemi Bolojan’s tinkling tinkerings on ‘The Great Escape’ and Oli Axel’s cosmically sad overhaul of ‘If You Were An Island’, which gives it a ‘Song For The Siren’-esque grandeur.

‘Remixes & Reworkings’ was originally given away for free to punters who bought the vinyl reissue of the splendidly slow-burning ‘ALMA’ album late last year. Now it is available to buy on its lonesome from iTunes (but you can still get it free when you buy the vinyl version from here: http://www.fiercepanda.co.uk/shop.php?release=524).

"We'd always liked the idea of having different versions of ALMA tracks," ALMA explain, breezily. "For example the live versions are different to the album, and even then there are different live versions depending on whether we've got the strings or not (or whether Pete can work his loop station at the time...). So the 'Remixes And Reworkings' mini-album is the next natural progression for our debut. We've been huge fans of each 'reworker' for a long time, so it's inspiring and really interesting to see where other people take each song.”

ALMA takes its name from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array – “a really bloody powerful telescope”, which is fitting as their music has been described as feeling like "it would sit at home as the background music to an ambient explosion in space."